Anticipating in Lapidus pere someone like Schlepperman—the comic Jew of Jack Benny’s radio program, with his Seventh Avenue accent and hopeless solecisms—I had discovered instead a soft-spoken patrician at ease with his wealth, whose voice was pleasantly edged with the broad vowels and lambent languor of Harvard, from which I discovered he had graduated in chemistry summa cum laude, carrying along with him the expertise to produce the victorious Worm.